Richard Thomalla

Richard Thomalla (1903 to 1945) was a German civil engineer by profession who became an SS commander of Nazi Germany and is recorded as a war criminal. Born in Sabine in Upper Silesia, now the village of Sowin in Poland, he joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and the SS, and was head of the SS Central Building Administration at the Lublin reservation in occupied Poland. In that role he was in charge of construction for the Operation Reinhard death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka during the Holocaust in Poland. Construction of Belzec began on 1 November 1941 and was completed in March 1942, he then designed and supervised the building of Sobibor, and Treblinka copied the design of Sobibor with some improvements. He was reportedly executed by the Soviet NKVD in Jicin, Czechoslovakia, on 12 May 1945 and was formally declared dead in absentia by a court in Ulm in 1957. His entry records the engineering of the camps as history, not as an achievement.